U.S. Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) joined together today to take a major step toward stemming the tide of America's eroding preventive medicine and public health workforce.

In a Perspective in the April 12, 2007 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Association of European Cancer Leagues describe the growing momentum for indoor smoking bans in countries across the globe.

Public health officials are growing increasingly concerned about drug resistant forms of tuberculosis. Last year, in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant TB killed 52 of 53 people infected. TB is highly contagious, and to keep drug-resistant types from spreading, some health experts are considering mandatory quarantines.

India's health biotech firms are emerging as a major global player, with growing means and know-how to produce innovative as well as generic drugs and vaccines at costs small relative to those of giant Western firms, according to ground-breaking Canadian research published April 9.

The World Health Organization is urging greater cooperation among nations to tackle the growing number of cross-border threats to public health.

One of the persistent riddles of the deadly 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic is why it struck different cities with varying severity. Why were some municipalities such as St. Louis spared the fate of the hard-hit cities like Philadelphia when both implemented similar public health measures?

Use of tolvaptan in addition to standard therapy improves some symptoms and signs of heart failure including congestion and breathing difficulty without major side effects, according to an article which examined the short-term (i.e., up to seven days) effects of tolvaptan.

Current methods used to sniff out dangerous airborne pathogens may wrongly suggest that there is no threat to health when, in reality, there may be.

A small piece of DNA that helps bacteria commonly found in US meat and poultry resist several antibiotics has also been found in the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis, gene sequence researchers report.